Accessibility

BALPA recognises the need for this website to be accessible to all. We have implemented a number of features to make this website easy to use, especially for users with disabilities.

This website aims to conform to Level A standard of the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It also includes many features found in AA sites such as colour considerations and easily resizable fonts. We will continue to make improvements and make sure this website conforms to these guidelines.

Please contact us if you have questions or feedback regarding the accessibility of this site, or if you have difficulty using it.

Accessibility features on this website
The following features improve navigation for text only browsers, screen reader users, and users of keyboard navigation.

Style sheets
This site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for visual layout. If your browser supports it, stylesheets can be disabled or over-ridden to customise the appearance of the website, to your preference.

Font sizes
You can change the font size of each page to your preference through the browser.

Forms
Labels are used to assist access to form fields. All forms follow a logical tab sequence.

Tables
Tables are used to display tabular data. Tables are not used for general site layout. This means our tables are being used in a correct and meaningful manner.

Colours
The site has been designed to be easy to read through its colour combinations. If you have any difficulty in reading parts of the site please contact us.

Links
We have worked hard to ensure that our links are meaningful, and some links are explained in greater detail by using a title attribute.

Scripting
JavaScript is used on the site to improve usability. All pages and processes are still accessible and usable if JavaScript is disabled or unavailable.

Browsers
This website is built to XHTML 1.0 and CSS 1.0 / 2.0 standards.

This website will function and look as intended in browsers that support these standards. The most common of these are;

Firefox 1.5 +
Internet Explorer 6.0+

If you do not have one of these browsers installed or are unable to upgrade, you may find the website easier to use by disabling CSS altogether - please see your browsers help documentation for further information.

Standards compliance

Our pages aim to conform to Level A compliance as specified by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This standard is endorsed by the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) and the Disability Rights Commission (http://www.drc-gb.org/).

Our pages use valid XHTML and CSS. To ensure code quality and that standards are maintained we are committed to checking this on a regular basis.

We are striving to meet our obligations under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 1995 with respect to the provision of services online.